Essential Criminology

Chapter 1

1. What does it mean to say that criminology is a science?
2. Who and what do criminologists study?
3. What does sociology have to offer criminology?
4. If no one reports a particular illegal act, is it a crime?
5. Can there be a crime if there is no victim?
6. What does it mean to say that society is the victim of a crime?
7. Where do laws come from?
8. Do some people benefit from some laws more than other people do?

1. How do we know how much crime there is?
2. What are some of the disadvantages of the Uniform Crime Report?
3. What are some of the problems with the National Crime Victimization Study?
4. How do we know how much corporate crime and government corruption there is?
5. What are some of the reasons why people fail to report some crimes?

1. What does it mean to have an economic model of crime?
2. Who had the power to make laws and pass judgement in the pre-classical era?
3. Who makes the laws and passes judgement now?
4. What does equal justice mean?
5. What are some of the elements of due process?
6. What is proportionality of punishment?

1. What does it mean to say that crime is in the blood?
2. What are the two main elements of crime according to biological criminologists?
3. What is positivism?
4. How did Garofalo apply Darwin’s theories to criminology?
5. Can genetics cause crime?
6. What is the medical model of crime control?

1. Does psychological criminology utilize an economic or medical model?
2. What does it mean to have a psychological predisposition towards committing crime?
3. According to psychoanalysis, how do people deal with the problem of guilty feelings?
4. What are some differences between psychoanalysis and trait-based personality theories?
5. What are the advantages of active over passive learning theories?
6. How does ecological psychology build on personal psychological theories?

1. According to differential association, do criminals have a different psychology than non-criminals?
2. What role does the environment play in learning crime?
3. Do criminals have a separate set of values from non-criminals?
4. How would a high-quality education affect crime?
5. What is a delinquent subculture?
6. What are some of the ways criminals justify their actions?

1. Is control theory a conflict or consensus approach?
2. What parts of society help teach people not to be criminals?
3. How does social disorganization affect crime?
4. Who has the power to label someone?
5. What effect does the social audience have on criminals?
6. How do stigma and shame effect crime?

1. Are there dangerous places or just dangerous people?
2. What does it mean to say that behavior is environmentally structured?
3. How does immigration affect crime?
4. What is the concentric zone theory?
5. What is the ecological fallacy?
6. What can communities do to make places safer?
7. What is the difference between primary and secondary cultural conflict?

1. What is a meso-level explanatory framework?
2. What is the difference between structural and cultural causes of human appetites?
3. According to strain theory, is crime rational or irrational?
4. Is Durkheim a conflict or consensus theorist?
5. What is the difference between relative deprivation and status frustration?
6. Does strain theory utilize an economic or medical model for reducing crime?

1. What is the view of human nature in conflict theory?
2. What is the difference between a micro and macro level theory of crime?
3. For Marxists, what is the root of social conflict?
4. What is the difference between an instrumental and structural view of the law?
5. Does Weber have an instrumental or structural view of society?
6. What is the difference between reformist and radical criminal justice policies?

1. What role do race and gender play in critical criminology?
2. What does the term socially constructed mean?
3. Do critical criminologists call for reform or radical transformation?
4. Which critical theory uses the theory of relative deprivation?
5. What is the difference between liberal and radical feminism?
6. What are the risks to criminology of nihilism?
7. How do anarchist criminologists propose to control crime?

1. What is meant by the term disorder?
2. What are some examples of disorderly behaviors?
3. What is the connection between disorder and fear?
4. How can disorder lead to neighborhood decline?
5. How do minor disorders lead to more serious crimes?

1. What are the major sources of the growth of disorder?
2. How does increased individualism lead to more disorder?
3. If individualism is a central aspect of modern capitalism, what’s new about it?
4. Why was deinstitutionalization and decriminalization undertaken?
5. What legal changes contributed to increased disorder?
6. How is disorder different from poverty or homelessness?

1. Why was it necessary to reform policing in the early 20^th Century?
2. What were the major elements of the Reform Model?
3. What role did science play in the Reform Model?
4. What does it mean to describe the police as the front end of the criminal justice system?
5. What are some of the failures of 911 policing?
6. What are some elements of the New Reform Model?

Chapter 4 (p.108-137)

1. Who provided political support and leadership for early public and private quality of life initiatives?
2. What is the connection between graffiti and panhandling on the subways?
3. What did the Transit Authority do to change the professional model of policing within the Transit Police?

Chapter 4 (p.137-156)

1. Why was the campaign against squeegee men successful and not the efforts against panhandling?
2. What was the new mission for the NYPD
3. What role did mayoral politics play in adopting this mission?
4. How has the Midtown Community Court helped to restore order?
5. Is quality of life policing the only reason that crime has gone down?

1. What are the 5 basic elements of community policing?
2. Is the NYPD’s current style of aggressive order maintenance consistent with the community policing model or the crime fighter/reform model?
3. What does it mean to say that incidents have neither a history nor a future in the crime fighter model?
4. What are some of the problems in carrying out aggressive order maintenance?
5. How does order maintenance policing represent a tyranny of the majority?
6. What is police discretion and how is it in conflict with enforcing the law?
7. How can discretion be shaped and limited?

1. How do communities make their order maintenance concerns known to police?
2. How do police judge what the needs and standards of the community are?
3. What is the major difference between the example of the Boyd Booth neighborhood and those of Seattle and San Francisco?
4. What are the major lessons about order maintenance the authors point to?
5. What can communities do to improve their chances of wining in court?

1. How are police the front end of the criminal justice system?
2. How is this different than using a community-based prevention approach?
3. What are the four main elements of the Broken Window model?
4. Who are the six percenters?
5. Do youth play a special role in disorder?
6. What other strategies could be used to control youth disorder?